As community development volunteers our job is to build relationships in a community and then find out the sort of things that people want to see be better and develop and then help them accomplish it. The types of projects we can do can be anything, literally. But one common thing people ask for is English teachers. We're told to not teach English exclusively because that's not what we're there for, but we can teach English in schools or as a club as a secondary project if that's what the community really wants. So two weeks we focused on English class and how to develop lesson plans. We are asked to come up with lessons and teach a "non-formal education" group an English class three times this week.
I've realized that I like the college-education approach to learning. I like hour long lectures where as much information is crammed into it as possible and you're expected to put in a ton of your own effort to understand and memorize. But I find language classes generally take an elementary school-education approach to learning. Very small amounts of information is presented and then you use a lot of time in class to practice and repeat and do activities and "make learning fun!" It's not better or worse one way or the other, but it's interesting to evaluate how I learn and what I prefer and see how and why I would teach a class.
Have I explained the showers here? It's actually dumping buckets of water over your head. And the water is cold. And there are generally mosquitoes floating on top of the water that you have to scoop off before you start pouring buckets of water over yourself. It makes me laugh pretty much every morning. When I first got here I was actulaly pretty cold, now it's getting warmer so it's not so bad to bathe in freezing cold water. Okay, so it's not that cold, I'm just a wimp. But I play this game to see how little amount of water I can use when I bathe. Surprisingly little water is actually required to bathe yourself. Who knew! At home we all take these showers that are like 10 minutes long so the water is running the whole time. Well, here I bathe for a very limited amoubnt of time and the water is only running when I manually pick up a bowl full of water and pour it over my head. It's actually kinda fun and now that I'm getting used to it I kinda like it. I mean, who knew you could use one little bowl full of water to wash your entire body!
This week was really productive in terms of making a very vague job seem more understandable and doable. We have technical trainings on Monday where we're taught about our responsiblities as a volunteer and then throughout the rest of the week we're asked to apply them. This week was about surveying people in the community to assess their needs and create projects to help the community develop. So we got some surveys and then divided into groups in order to go survey different people. There was a game/contest to see who could do the most surveys and collect the most pictures/fliers/bulletins/signs. Every survey or thing you collect you get a certain number of points. This was to help us look around and find information that is available all around us. So this past week I went with a group to survey people about the environment, their schools, and their religious services. The surveys were actually really interesting. Many Thai people burn their trash instead of having trash collection. So there is burning everywhere all the time. This leads to health problems like asthma or other respiratory diseases. But also it's just really bad for the greenhouse effect. So we asked people about it and it was just really interesting what people had to say about it. Recycling is also something that is just starting to come about here and it's always interesting just to see what people have to say about it. And I took a million pictures while doing all of this. And my group won. Of course. Every bulletin or sign I saw I took a picture of and we did like 10 surveys while other groups did maybe 4. Haha! I'm so competitive. IT doesn't even matter what it's about and it doesn't matter that all I won was a mini snickers the fact is all the extra effort was well worth it because my team won and I really like winning.
It's getting really hot here now and the humidity may actually be higher than Florida.
I've realized that I like the college-education approach to learning. I like hour long lectures where as much information is crammed into it as possible and you're expected to put in a ton of your own effort to understand and memorize. But I find language classes generally take an elementary school-education approach to learning. Very small amounts of information is presented and then you use a lot of time in class to practice and repeat and do activities and "make learning fun!" It's not better or worse one way or the other, but it's interesting to evaluate how I learn and what I prefer and see how and why I would teach a class.
Have I explained the showers here? It's actually dumping buckets of water over your head. And the water is cold. And there are generally mosquitoes floating on top of the water that you have to scoop off before you start pouring buckets of water over yourself. It makes me laugh pretty much every morning. When I first got here I was actulaly pretty cold, now it's getting warmer so it's not so bad to bathe in freezing cold water. Okay, so it's not that cold, I'm just a wimp. But I play this game to see how little amount of water I can use when I bathe. Surprisingly little water is actually required to bathe yourself. Who knew! At home we all take these showers that are like 10 minutes long so the water is running the whole time. Well, here I bathe for a very limited amoubnt of time and the water is only running when I manually pick up a bowl full of water and pour it over my head. It's actually kinda fun and now that I'm getting used to it I kinda like it. I mean, who knew you could use one little bowl full of water to wash your entire body!
This week was really productive in terms of making a very vague job seem more understandable and doable. We have technical trainings on Monday where we're taught about our responsiblities as a volunteer and then throughout the rest of the week we're asked to apply them. This week was about surveying people in the community to assess their needs and create projects to help the community develop. So we got some surveys and then divided into groups in order to go survey different people. There was a game/contest to see who could do the most surveys and collect the most pictures/fliers/bulletins/signs. Every survey or thing you collect you get a certain number of points. This was to help us look around and find information that is available all around us. So this past week I went with a group to survey people about the environment, their schools, and their religious services. The surveys were actually really interesting. Many Thai people burn their trash instead of having trash collection. So there is burning everywhere all the time. This leads to health problems like asthma or other respiratory diseases. But also it's just really bad for the greenhouse effect. So we asked people about it and it was just really interesting what people had to say about it. Recycling is also something that is just starting to come about here and it's always interesting just to see what people have to say about it. And I took a million pictures while doing all of this. And my group won. Of course. Every bulletin or sign I saw I took a picture of and we did like 10 surveys while other groups did maybe 4. Haha! I'm so competitive. IT doesn't even matter what it's about and it doesn't matter that all I won was a mini snickers the fact is all the extra effort was well worth it because my team won and I really like winning.
It's getting really hot here now and the humidity may actually be higher than Florida.
I agree with your preferred way of learning. In my German class, we are shoved as much knowledge as possible and then told to go and work on it on our own. It's a little frustrating when I'm used to a teacher going a LOT slower, but I learn so much even faster and I still love the language.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you're really enjoying it out there. I'm really happy about that.
From your last postings it sounds like a mini-snickers would be quite a great reward!
ReplyDelete